UQ Wire: Village Voice - 10 Unanswered Questions

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On Monday, December 5, the 9-11 Public
Discourse Project—a private group formed by 9-11 Commission
members after their official mandate lapsed in 2004—held a
wrap-up press briefing in Washington, signaling the last
gasp of official inquiries into the attacks four years ago.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology also
recently completed its final report on the twin towers.
Already gathering dust are a Federal Emergency Management
Agency study, the joint inquiry by Congress, the McKinsey
reports on New York City's emergency response, probes by
federal inspectors general, and other efforts to resolve the
myriad doubts about the hijackings.

Some questions can't
be answered: People who lost loved ones will never know
exactly how the end came, if it hurt, what the final
thoughts and words were. But other questions are more
tractable. Here are 10 of them:

1. Where was the
"National Command Authority"?

There has never been a
true accounting of why the nation's leaders were out of the
loop for so long that morning. George W. Bush and his aides
even have told different versions of how the president was
actually informed of the first plane striking: The president
claimed erroneously that he saw it on TV, while chief of
staff Andrew Card said it was Karl Rove who told the
president. According to the official version, after Rove
told Bush, the president talked to then national-security
adviser Condoleezza Rice. She told him about the crash but
apparently did not know about the reported hijacking of
American Airlines Flight 11, which military air defenses
learned about 17 minutes earlier.

Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld was informed of the second plane hitting the
WTC—yes, the second plane—during his intelligence briefing
but continued the briefing and was at his desk when Flight
77 struck the Pentagon.

Together, the president and
secretary of defense are the National Command Authority that
is supposed to lead the country in the case of military
emergency. But Bush didn't get in touch with Rumsfeld until
after 10 a.m., around the time the fourth and final plane
crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When Bush was
criticized days after 9-11 for failing to return to
Washington until more than 10 hours after the first attack,
the White House claimed there had been a threat ("real and
credible," in flack Ari Fleischer's words) to Air Force One.
There was none. All the 9-11 Commission says of this phantom
threat is that it was the product of "a misunderstood
communication."

2. Who gave the order to try to shoot
the planes down?

The commission is noticeably vague on
this point. The official version says Dick Cheney told the
military a little past 10 a.m. to shoot down a threatening
plane, claiming that the president had given his approval
for the order. But while a few people in the White House
bunker noted a call between Cheney and Bush moments earlier,
only Rice says she heard Cheney bring up the shoot-down
order. Despite the fact that people at both ends of the call
were taking notes, the commission found that "there is no
documentary evidence of this call." Meanwhile, some of the
fighter jets in the air over D.C. received no orders to
shoot down planes, while other military aircraft got the OK
from the Secret Service to fly "weapons free," which means
they had wide authority to take out suspicious aircraft.

Since the military was given little or no notice about
the planes, maybe it doesn't matter who authorized a
shoot-down. But the record is unclear. Neither Cheney nor
Bush testified under oath before the 9-11 panel, in public
or private.

3. What exactly were all those
firefighters doing in the towers?

Reports on the
disaster reflect confusion over the exact mission of the
firefighters who climbed the twin towers, many of whom died.
The 9-11 Commission says fire chiefs decided early on that
because the fire was so big, their job would "primarily be
one of rescue." But NIST reports that some fire commanders
thought their men would fight fires to save people trapped
above them, and individual fire companies thought their
mission was to "get up to the fire as soon as possible, put
the fire out, and get ready for their next assignment."
According to oral histories collected by the FDNY, some
firefighters were told to head up the stairs carrying hoses,
and others to drop their hoses in the lobby. Some were
ordered simply to head up the stairs without a clear idea of
where they were going or why.

While it is doubtless that
first responders saved lives that day, it's not clear that
there were many people left to be rescued when late-arriving
firefighters began climbing the stairs, especially in the
north tower. Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have said up to
25,000 people escaped the towers; NIST has put that figure
at around 15,000—still a blessing. But NIST believes that 90
percent of those civilians who survived started descending
both towers before the second plane hit. (About 1,000 of
them were "mobility impaired" and needed help getting out.)
Just shy of 2,000 of the roughly 2,150 civilians who died in
the towers were trapped above the impact zones, with no
chance of rescue.

4. Did anyone think the towers would
collapse?

Reports on the FDNY response to 9-11
generally agree that, as the FDNY-commissioned McKinsey
study put it, "Chief officers considered a limited,
localized collapse of the towers possible, but did not think
that they would collapse entirely." For some of the fire
officers, that confidence might have been based on a
misconception about how the towers were built: The FDNY
chief of safety says in his oral history that he thought the
towers were made of block construction, with a solid
concrete core, so that fire crews would have at least three
hours to work. In fact, the cores of the towers were
sheetrock over steel. And the citywide safety chief in
charge that day didn't know a plane had hit the north tower.

Evidently, fears about collapse evolved as the disaster
wore on. Peter Ganci, the highest ranking chief and one of
the 343 fire personnel who died, reportedly told the
commander in the north-tower lobby at 9:45 a.m. that he
might want to consider an evacuation—almost 45 minutes
before that building collapsed. Assistant Chief Joseph
Callan, the citywide tour commander that day, told
investigators: "Approximately 40 minutes after I arrived in
the lobby I made a decision that the building was no longer
safe and that was based on the conditions in the lobby—large
pieces of plaster falling, all the 20-foot-high glass panels
on the exterior of the lobby were breaking, there was
obvious movement of the building, and that was the reason on
the handy talky I gave the order for all fire department
units to leave the north tower. Approximately ten minutes
after that we had collapse of the south tower." Fire chiefs
also received—just moments before the south tower fell—a
report that someone from the city's Office of Emergency
Management thought the towers weren't structurally sound.
The source of that report is unknown.

5. Why was
Giuliani's command bunker at ground zero?

A constant
refrain in rehashes of 9-11 is that the cooperation between
police and fire services that day was poor. The OEM was
unable to bridge the gap because it was busy evacuating its
own emergency center in 7 WTC. "The loss of the OEM
operations center," NIST found, "created difficulties
related to the coordination of emergency responder
operations and resources." Because the World Trade Center
had been a terrorist target in 1993, Giuliani was criticized
in 1998 for his decision to locate the emergency center
there. Yet when Giuliani and Jerry Hauer (who was OEM
director when the 7 WTC site was picked) appeared before the
9-11 Commission, no one asked them about the bunker. Nor did
commissioners ask Giuliani specifically why firefighters
were using the same radios on 9-11 that had worked so poorly
in the '93 bombing. Part of the reason was the city had
broken contracting rules when it purchased new radios
earlier in 2001, and those radios had to be withdrawn
because of technical problems.

6. Why did 7 WTC
fall?

Seven World Trade Center—where, besides OEM, the
CIA, Salomon Smith Barney, and other entities had
offices—was the last building to collapse on 9-11. It was
also probably the first steel skyscraper anywhere to
collapse solely because of fire. We still don't know why.
While NIST has completed its twin towers reports, it has
delayed its 7 WTC report twice; it's currently not expected
until next spring.

Several 7 WTC tenants, including OEM
and the Secret Service, had tanks filled with diesel fuel to
power emergency generators. If that fuel leaked and burned,
it may have heated the building's steel supports to the
point of failure, but according to FEMA's report on the
collapse this "best hypothesis has only a low probability of
occurrence."

7. How did the twin towers
fall?

Many FDNY personnel who saw the south tower
collapse reported explosions at the lower levels as the top
began collapsing. These reports, as well as "squibs" of
smoke seen on video of the collapses, have led to theories
that the towers were brought down in controlled explosions.
NIST dismisses these notions, claiming that the puffs of
smoke were the result of air being forced down by the top of
the tower collapsing.

NIST said the towers fell because
the planes shook fireproofing loose from the steel
superstructure, and the fire heated the floor-supporting
trusses so much that they pulled in on support columns that
were already holding more than their regular load. But
NIST's computer simulation stops at the point the collapse
begins, and does not document exactly how the rest of the
buildings crumbled in 10 seconds. The reason for this
omission could be the sheer complexity of the
computations—even NIST's simplified model took weeks to run
on a computer.

Conspiracy theorists aren't the only ones
who dispute NIST's version: Some fire scientists also take
issue with the institute's methods and conclusions. And the
point isn't just historical. The lessons learned from the
WTC collapse will inform decisions about the safety of other
modern office towers.

8. How dangerous was—and is—the
air at ground zero?

A few days after the towers fell,
the Environmental Protection Agency announced that tests of
air and water near the WTC site "indicate that these vital
resources are safe." The only problem was, as the EPA's
inspector general reported later, the agency "did not have
sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket
statement." What's more, the inspector general said, "the
White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced,
through the collaboration process, the information that EPA
communicated to the public."

The 9-11 Commission did not
address this topic in the body of its final report. In a
single footnote, the panel said it didn't have the expertise
to talk about the air testing, but let the White House off
the hook for influencing EPA press releases. Then–EPA head
Christine Whitman told the commission that she had met with
a top Bush economic adviser "regarding the need to get
financial markets open quickly," but denied any pressure to
fudge the air quality readings. A group of 12 people has
sued the EPA over health problems they blame on poor air
quality near the site after the attacks. Meanwhile, the EPA
just last week approved a plan to test and clean apartments
south of Canal Street.

9. What exactly did Zacarias
Moussaoui plan to do?

Was he the 20th hijacker? Or was
he supposed to pilot a fifth plane on September 11? Or was
he a backup for Ziad Jarrah, the Flight 93 hijack pilot,
whose disagreements with Mohammed Atta almost got him
dropped from the plot? Or was he a pilot for a "second wave"
of attacks, as captured Al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed is quoted saying in the 9-11 Commission report?

Last April, Moussaoui pled guilty to conspiracy charges,
but claimed that he had nothing to do with 9-11 and instead
was planning a separate attack to try to free Sheikh Omar
Abdel Rahman.

The Department of Justice hasn't said
publicly exactly what Moussaoui did—stating in court filings
merely that Moussaoui "participated" in the 9-11 plot—but it
does want to execute him for his alleged role

10.
What's on those blanked-out pages?

"The Joint Inquiry
Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the
Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which was released
in late 2002, included 28 pages that were blanked out,
apparently concerning the possible role of Saudi government
officials. Those aren't the only blank spots in the public
record. As the Voice reported in October, there are multiple
redactions in the FDNY oral histories that in some cases
seem to concern the radios or suspicious activity near the
WTC site before and during the
attacks.

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FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not always been specifically authorized by
the copyright owner. We are making such material available
in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice,
political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific,
and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes
a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided
for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for
research and educational purposes. For more information go
to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you
wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes
of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain
permission from the copyright owner.

********************

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